November 20th 2019 was a day of worry and preparations at the warehouse (Bijlmer, Amsterdam). That warehouse was then home to approximately 100 young men from Gambia, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Senegal. An eviction was planned at 9 AM the next day. The young men were classified as “undocumented people,” even though their legal statuses and migration pathways could hardly be lumped together under a single label.
Some of these men had gained protection from Italy but moved to the Netherlands in search of better job opportunities; others had been rejected by Italy or other Member States and wanted to apply for asylum again; yet others were defined as "out-of-procedure" by Dutch authorities, as they had exhausted all avenues for regularising their status.
On the eviction day, the migrants were prepared: personal belongings, mattresses, and food had already been taken out of the warehouse when the police arrived. No resistance. “We are tired. We'd better die” – someone said. Others took it more philosophically: “It's always the same story anyway. Tomorrow we'll see”.
After eviction, the group dispersed to various destinations across the city, depending on their networks or the support received from volunteers and local associations. However, none of them could be hosted in the facilities of the new national program for sheltering undocumented people called the LVV (Landelijke Vreemdelingen Voorziening, literally "National Aliens Service") that Amsterdam was testing at the time. Most of them did not meet the program's requirements.
What was the aim of the programme and who was considered deserving enough to enter it? These are some of the questions that we tried to answer in our study, recently published in Cities.
When we approached the LVV program as foreign researchers, we were somewhat surprised by the open-minded nature of a programme that was providing services to the "undocumented", a group of people often considered to be formally "non-existent" and by definition "undeserving" of any public service. This reflection is even more important today given the recent top-down propositions to completely stop any reception facilities for undocumented migrants in the Netherlands. City representatives were hopeful about program’s potential for coping with the city’s growing population of undocumented people, estimated at around 15,000 and many are still fighting today to try to maintain the basic services that the LVV allowed to provide for some.
However, the more we studied the program and its more or less direct effects, the more we also noticed some of its problematic implications. In particular, our study suggests that the pilot program introduced a new "hierarchy of deservingness" among undocumented migrants that effectively reinforced at local level the justifications for exclusion from basic services and territorial expulsion.
